Church of the Churchless

“I’m right” vs. “I like” morality

It feels so good to be right. Or rather, to believe that we're right – which means that other people must be wrong. This is a big reason religion is so popular. It offers a pleasant sensation of self-righteousness.

There's also a simpler way of feeling good. To just feel good. Janis Joplin sang it.

You know feeling good was good enough for me
Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee.

We can just say "I like," rather than justifying our preference with an "I'm right."

What a difference it would make if Christians said, "I like feeling that Jesus loves me and died for my sins." If Muslims said, "I like the idea that there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet." If Buddhists said, "I like how the Eightfold Path is aimed at alleviating suffering."

Once we make improvable assertions into a matter of right and wrong, divisiveness necessarily follows. But in everyday life, most of the time we don't make likes and dislikes into moral certitudes.

I happen to hate beans. One of the few Mexican phrases that I know is "Sin frijoles," without beans. I need it to order in a Mexican restaurant. However, it doesn't bother me to see my dining companion happily devouring her frijoles.

Some people like beans. Others don't. Similarly, some people approve of gay sex. Others don't. Yet attitudes toward homosexuality are much more likely to fall into "I'm right" rather than "I like."

The New York Times Magazine recently featured a fascinating essay by Steven Pinker, "The Moral Instinct." Pinker says:

The starting point for appreciating that there is a distinctive part of our psychology for morality is seeing how moral judgments differ from other kinds of opinions we have on how people ought to behave.

Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set that makes us deem actions immoral ("killing is wrong"), rather than merely disagreeable ("I hate brussels sprouts"), unfashionable ("bell-bottoms are out") or imprudent ("don't scratch mosquito bites").

We need to be careful, then, about getting all high and mighty when our supposedly universal moral judgment really is nothing more than a personal like or dislike. Pinker mentions the work of psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

People don't generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification.

So does this mean that morality inescapably is subjective, that right and wrong are in the eye of the beholder rather than some objective Platonic realm of goodness?

Not exactly. Pinker says that while there isn't any sign of "cosmically inscribed Thou-Shalts," a few If-Thens are evident which "point any rational, self-preserving social agent in a moral direction."

One is the prevalence of nonzero-sum games. In many arenas of life, two parties are objectively better off if they both act in a nonselfish way than if each of them acts selfishly.

…The other external support for morality is a feature of rationality itself: that it cannot depend on the egocentric vantage point of the reasoned. If I appeal to you to do anything that affects me – to get off my foot, or tell me the time or not run me over with your car – then I can't do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours (say, retaining my right to run you over with my car) if I want you to take me seriously.

It turns out, then, that "I'm right" runs a big risk of striking at the heart of morality, because it fosters a sense of privilege and entitlement that militates against the Golden Rule'ish balanced give and take described by Pinker.

I used to feel that drinking alcohol and eating meat were wrong. Not just wrong for me, because I didn't like to do these things, but for everybody.

I wasn't horribly moralistic in my tilt toward tee totaling and vegetarianism. But I did consider that I was on higher moral ground than imbibers and carnivores.

Now, not nearly so much. I'm sipping a glass of Oregon Pinot Noir as I write this, having become the person that I warned myself about.

However, I still don't eat animals. I don't like the idea of killing a sentient being to fill my stomach. I wouldn't say that I'm right and you're wrong, though, if you just had a hamburger.

Mostly, we're all trying to do the right thing – morality isn't the special province of any particular religion, nationality, or belief system. I liked this part of Pinker's essay:

At the very least, the science tells us that even when our adversaries' agenda is most baffling, they may not be amoral psychopaths but in the throes of a moral mind-set that appears to them to be every bit as mandatory and universal as ours does to us.

Of course, some adversaries really are psychopaths, and others are so poisoned by a punitive moralization that they are beyond the pale of reason.

…But in any conflict in which a meeting of the minds is not completely hopeless, a recognition that the other guy is acting from moral rather venal reasons can be a first patch of common ground.

Marcus Aurelius’ meditations move me

In my previous post about death and Stoicism, I didn't give my main Stoic man, Marcus Aurelius, the blog time that he deserves.

So yesterday I found my well-thumbed copy of his Meditations, a hard to find 1964 translation by Maxwell Staniforth, and re-read some of Marcus' marvelous observations on living a good life. And dying a good death.

I'm putting this post in my "Plotinus" category because both of these philosophers, one of whom I've written my own book about, shared a fundamental Stoic philosophy.

Which moves me.

Now, that's sort of a contradiction, because Stoicism holds (along with Buddhism) that it's possible to be detached from the ever-changing circumstances of life. We have the power to choose our subjective response to objective reality so events don't excessively move us.

Some quotations from the Meditations:

Among the truths you will do well to contemplate most frequently are these two: first, that things can never touch the soul, but stand inert outside it, so that disquiet can arise only from fancies within; and secondly, that all visible objects change in a moment, and will be no more. Think of the countless changes in which you yourself have had a part. The whole universe is change, and life itself is but what you deem it.

Never go beyond the sense of your original impressions. These tell you that such-and-such a person is speaking ill of you; that was their message; they did not go on to say it has done you any harm. I see my child is ill; my eyes tell me that, but they do not suggest that his life is in danger. Always, then, keep to the original impressions; supply no additions of your own, and you are safe. Or at least, add only a recognition of the great world-order by which all things are brought to pass.

That "great world-order" doesn't include a personal God. So Marcus and Plotinus resonate with my churchless soul. Using modern parlance, we'd say they're spiritual but not religious.

Staniforth's Introduction makes this clear. It's available in its entirety via Google Book Search. Pages 7-25 are a good overview of Stoicism and Marcus Aurelius.

I like how (on pp. 21-22) Staniforth talks about how Marcus, ostensibly a Stoic, was so obviously moved by moods of hope and depression, and how he had an evident longing for sympathy and affection.

The Meditations are Marcus Aurelius' diary, a deeply personal record of his struggles to live up to the high Stoic standards he set for himself. Staniforth says that when "we overhear the philosopher-emperor's secret communing with his own soul, and remember that at no time is he addressing any human auditor but himself, I believe every instinct tells us that we are in the presence of a man who is simple, humble, and utterly sincere."

Guess that helps explain why his writings move me so much. Marcus doesn't speak from a holier-than-thou perspective (though his ego does occasionally come through). He's uncertain about what will happen after death – refreshing, compared to the spiritual know it all's of both his and our time.

In death, Alexander of Macedon's end differed no whit from his stable-boy's. Either both were received into the same generative principle of the universe, or both alike were dispersed into atoms.

He who fears death either fears to lose all sensation or fears new sensations. In reality, you will either feel nothing at all, and therefore nothing evil, or else, if you can feel any new sensations, you will be a new creature, and so will not have ceased to have life.

Happy the soul which, at whatever moment the call comes for release from the body, is equally ready to face extinction, dispersion, or survival.

Stoicism in general, and Marcus Aurelius in particular, appeal to my modern scientific mind. There's little in the Meditations that conflicts with current understanding of the universe, once we realize that the Stoic "God" is the same as "Nature."

Staniforth says, "Stoicism is thus a pantheistic creed: that is to say, it holds that God is immanent in all created things, but has no separate existence outside them."

There's a universal order in the universe (not surprisingly). The Stoics, along with Plotinus, called it a World Soul. I call it the laws of nature. Same thing, really.

Nature does its thing. So do we, who also have a soul – consciousness. The big difference between us and the World Soul is that we're a part of the whole, and the World Soul is the whole.

Which makes for a big power imbalance.

As the saying goes, "man proposes and God disposes." I tried to drive our Prius up the driveway last night. Nature, however, had put a layer of snow over some ice. After spinning my wheels I backed down into the garage.

Nothing wrong had happened. There was no call for me to say, "How cruel is the world!" I simply had to adjust myself to circumstances, to objective reality. I put the garbage can in the back of our all-wheel-drive Highlander Hybrid and got up the hill without much problem.

If you are doing what is right, never mind whether you are freezing with cold or beside a good fire; heavy-eyed, or fresh from a sound sleep; reviled or applauded; in the act of dying or about some other piece of business. (For even dying is part of the business of life; and there too no more is required of us than 'to see the moment's work well done'.)

Nature always has an end in view; and this aim includes a thing's ending as much as its beginning or its duration. She is like the ball's thrower. Is the ball itself bettered by its upward flight? Is it any worse as it comes down, or as it lies after its fall? What does a bubble gain by holding together, or lose by collapsing? The like is true of a candle, too.

Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on to say, "Why were things of this sort brought into the world?"

As I observed in "Death shines under a full moon," religion finds something wrong with the cosmos that needs to be fixed: "that nature, God, Tao, whoever or whatever runs the cosmos, has seriously screwed things up. And it takes a savior, a guru, a god-man, a revelation, a miracle, to get life and death back in order."

I like how Stoicism sees the order of the universe as being just fine the way it is. That puts the responsibility for getting in tune with it on us.

All the blessings which you pray to obtain hereafter could be yours today, if you did not deny them to yourself.

When a man finds his sole good in that which the appointed hour brings him; when he cares not if his actions be many or few, so they accord with strict reason; when it matters nought to him whether his glimpse of this world be long or fleeting – not death itself can be a thing of terror for him.

I'll end with a passage from Marcus' Meditations that contains, in three sentences, one of them very long, a wonderful summation of Stoic philosophy. I broke it up into a more poetic format – didn't change any wording.

You are composed of three parts:
body, breath, and mind.
The first two merely belong to you
in the sense that you are responsible for their care;
the last alone is truly yours.

If, then, you put away from this real self
– from your understanding, that is –
everything that others do or say
and everything you yourself did or said in the past,
together with every anxiety about the future,
and everything affecting the body or its partner breath
that is outside your own control,
as well as everything that swirls about you
in the eddy of outward circumstance,
so that the powers of your mind,
kept thus aloof and unspotted from all that destiny can do,
may live their own life in independence,
doing what is just,
consenting to what befalls,
and speaking what is true –
if, I say, you put away from this master-faculty of yours
every such clinging attachment,
and whatever lies in the years ahead
or the years behind,
teaching yourself to become what Empedocles calls
a "totally rounded orb, in its own rotundity joying",
and to be concerned solely with the life which you are now living,
the life of the present moment,
then until death comes
you will be able to pass the rest of your days
in freedom from all anxiety,
and in kindliness and good favour with the deity within you.

Embracing a Stoic view of death

Like I said at the end of my previous post about dealing with death, there isn't much to add to the philosophic options given to us by the ancient Greeks and Romans.

After all, there are only so many different ways of looking at reality. The ancients ran though them all. Metaphysical. Natural. Atomistic. Holistic. Rational. Mystical.

So when I found myself leaning toward a "nature knows what it's doing" attitude toward death, it didn't take me long to realize that I was walking on well-trod Stoic ground.

I love Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. Aurelius was a Roman emperor who penned philosophic observations while campaigning against his enemies.

He's helped me get through a bout in the dentist's chair and frustrations with Microsoft. Granted, those aren't quite as serious a problem as death, but Stoicism is well-suited to coping with just about anything.

Because one of its main tenets is to focus on the thing itself, not our reaction to it. It's amazing how problems fade away when we don't spread our own mental crap on top of what's really going on.

"His ship sank."
"What happened?"
"His ship sank."

"He was sent to prison." But if you add the proposition "a terrible thing happened to him," then that is coming from you.

These quotes are from Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher who Marcus Aurelius much admired. They're in Pierre Hadot's The Inner Citadel, translated by Michael Chase.

The "citadel" being referred to is what's under our control: the judgments we make about what's happening. Ships may sink. Jail doors may close. Death may be at hand.

Those are facts. How we look upon them is something different. The Stoic ideal is to see things as they are, not as how our imagination considers them to be.

An objective or adequate representation is one which corresponds exactly to reality, which is to say that it engenders within us an inner discourse which is nothing other than the pure and simple description of an event, without the addition of any subjective value-judgment.

"He was sent to jail.
What happened? He was sent to jail. But 'He is unhappy' is added by oneself [i.e., subjectively]"

Thus both Marcus and Epictetus draw a clear distinction between "objective" inner discourse, which is merely a pure description of reality, and "subjective" inner discourse, which includes conventional or passionate considerations, which have nothing to do with reality.

As I wrote about in my previous post, I (obviously) was very much alive when I began to envision my death. Even more, there wasn't anything or anyone threatening me. Certainly not the full moon.

The thoughts of death that produced such a disquieting feeling in me came from…me.

To a Stoic, it's natural to be startled by things that go bump in the night. And that includes self-induced bumps, such as One day I'm not going to exist anymore!

However, what happens next often is unnatural. We start talking to ourselves. This subjective inner dialogue imagines all kinds of things.

"Somebody's broken into the house. They're coming to get me." "Death is going to cast me into eternal nothingness. I'll be non-existent for eternity."

Who says? How do you know? What in the here and now supports these notions of there and then?

Often, if not usually, zilch. Nada. Nothing.

My anxiety about nothingness is rooted in nothing. Crazy.

Yet this is a reflection of the normal state of human affairs. We're always making up stories in our heads. We project plot lines both forward into the future and backward into the past, even though we're not in control of the action, nor do we have a view of the entire stage.

When death comes, die. Until then, live – in reality, not fantasy.

If we want to become aware of our true selves, we must concentrate upon the present. As Marcus puts it, we must "circumscribe the present," and separate ourselves from that which no longer belongs to us: our past words and actions, and our future words and actions. Seneca has already expressed this idea:

"These two things must be cut away: fear of the future, and the memory of past sufferings. The latter no longer concern me, and the future does not concern me yet."

Death shines under a full moon

Walking the dog last night, I turned around when we got to the path that leads to Spring Lake. A full, or almost full, moon had risen above the tree tops.

Clear and cold. No sounds. Moonshine on the fir trees. Beautiful.

I spoke to whoever the heck it is I talk to on such occasions. "Thank you. For letting me be alive. To be aware of this moment, right here, right now."

But my gratitude had a flip side. And it made an appearance almost immediately.

Because I couldn't help going on to envision my death. No more dog walks. No more moon-jestic Oregon nights. No more anything.

Just nothing. Except there wouldn't even be "nothing," because consciousness is needed to be aware of nothing, and death will take away that.

It was a familiar feeling. Like standing on the edge of an abyss, teetering, knowing you're going to fall. Probably not now. But eventually. Guaranteed.

Dread mixed with the gratitude. Existential emptiness lay under the full moon.

In the next twenty minutes, as dog and man continued their walk around the lake and back through the forest, I ran through the basic philosophic and religious tricks that death-fearing people have used throughout history to keep the heebie-jeebies at bay.

Deny reality. I thought, "It'd be great if I kept on living after I died. That'd solve everything." Problem is, I'm no longer capable of believing in comforting beliefs like that. I know what I'm up to: seeking reassurance to life's biggest problem – not living – by denying it exists. Scratch that trick.

Embrace the angst. I shifted gears to facing the prospect of nothingness head on. I tried to talk myself into a positive answer to "How bad could not-existing be if I'm not around to know it?" Going to sleep is pleasant enough. Never waking up adds in a decided creepiness factor, though. Good try, but not good enough.

Lower expectations. "Okay," I told myself. "Look at it this way. You've been alive for 59 years. It could have been zero. Every year, every day, every hour, every second you're conscious is an inconceivably precious opportunity or gift. Appreciate it, you ingrate. Instead of feeling bad that you won't live forever, feel good that you've been alive at all."

That last inner dialogue had the most effect on me. It bounced me back to the present moment, to hearing my boots crunch on the gravel on top of the dam, the distant hooting of an owl.

Fear of death requires the thought of dying. If I'm only aware of being here and now, the prospect of not being there and then can't arise.

After I got home and fed the dog, who is an excellent example of living in the moment – food! good! yum! sleep! – I mulled over a more refined version of my philosophy of death.

I was struck by how religions almost invariably view death as a obstacle to be overcome. We need our souls to be saved, our bodies to be resurrected, our karmic bonds of birth and rebirth to be broken.

But this presumes there's a problem, that nature, God, Tao, whoever or whatever runs the cosmos, has seriously screwed things up.

And it takes a savior, a guru, a god-man, a revelation, a miracle, to get life and death back in order.

Funny. Nobody talks this way about other laws of nature. Gravity seems to work just fine. Ditto with electromagnetism.

Sure, some people fall off high places and go splat. Others get electrocuted. But we accept that the universe is set up, law-wise, just the way it should be. It's our job to adjust to the laws of nature, not for them to change to suit us.

With death though, it's the opposite. We want to cheat death, to block its game plan, to derail the Grim Reaper train that's transporting us hell-bent to god-knows-where.

In short, to get a very special favor: not die. (Along with an enjoyable afterlife, thank you very much.)

Well, as with almost every other philosophical notion, the ancient Greeks and Romans got there first. A fact I reminded myself of this morning when I browsed through some Marcus Aurelius.

(to be continued…I hope)

Meditation is useless

I like it when a practitioner says, "There's no point to what I'm doing." Especially when he's talking about a supposedly spiritual practice.

For me, this is the dividing line between fake religiosity and genuine whatever. (I tried to think of a better word than whatever, but couldn't).

You just do it to do it. Meditation. Prayer. Worship. Study. Whatever.

Zen and Taoism appeal to me because they extol uselessness. In "The Tao of Paris Hilton" I said:

And let us also learn to appreciate Paris more by studying this passage from "The Book of Chuang Tzu," where a long-lived, greatly-venerated tree appears to Master Shih in a dream and explains why it has never been cut down like other trees:

Because they are useful, they suffer, and they are unable to live out the years Heaven has given them. They have only their usefulness to blame for this destruction wrought by the people. It is the same with all things. I have spent a long time studying to be useless, though on a couple of occasions I was nearly destroyed. However, now I have perfected the art of uselessness, and this is very useful, to me! If I had been of use, could I have grown so vast?

On the Zen front, Zoketsu Norman Fischer speaks about the uselessness of zazen (Zen meditation) in "A Coin Lost in the River is Found in the River."

Nice essay. This is the sort of non-religious religion the world needs more of.

Zazen is fundamentally a useless and pointless activity. A person is devoted to zazen not because it helps anything or is peaceful or interesting or because Buddha tells him to do it — though we may imagine that it helps or is peaceful or interesting — but simply because one is devoted to it. You can't argue for it or justify it or make it into something good. You just do it because you do it. It's not even a question of wanting to or not wanting to. Zazen for zazen's sake. Birds sing, fish swim, and people who are devoted to zazen do zazen with devotion all the time although there is no need for it.

I've meditated daily for almost forty years. I've read Zen literature for even longer. I've never actually practiced Zen. But maybe I have. Heck, I surely have.

We all have. We're alive. And once in a while, either by accident or on purpose, or with purposeless purpose, we see what life seemingly is all about. A glimpse at least.

It's cold here in Oregon right now. Freezing cold at night, which is fairly rare in the temperate Willamette Valley. This morning I got up and looked at our indoor thermometer, which also shows the outdoor temperature.

"27.2 degrees," I said to myself. At that moment I had a flash of it's so absolutely right. That was the temperature! Absolutely marvelous! In a little while it'd be different. And that too, absolutely right.

It might snow later in the week. Which could make it tough to drive around. Still, absolutely right. There's always only one thing going on: what's going on.

Any attempt to convince oneself of that – completely useless. Yet this is what religion is all about. As is Zen and Taoism.

The only difference, and it's a big one, is that religions take themselves seriously. Zen and Taoism don't. From what I've read, the ultimate Zen experience is throwing a pie in the face of your most revered Master.

Whereupon he laughs uproariously. So do you. What a joke!

In a dharma talk, "Three Ways to See Zazen," Fischer speaks more about how there's nothing to do. But that nothing needs to be done anyway. He says that zazen isn't like waiting for something that we expect is coming.

Zazen is certainly not waiting in this sense. It is waiting in the profound sense of waiting for nothing. Simply waiting. No expectations, nothing that is supposed to happen. No desired result. Just this moment of sheer presence.

Waiting – for what? If "nothing" seems too uninspiring and foreboding perhaps we can say we are waiting for God. This is the title of one of Simone Weil's books, Waiting for God.

That's how God appears- not by summoning God, or by performing sacrifice, prayer, or something like that, so as to manipulate God, causing God to appear on demand, like a vending machine- put in the quarters and you'll hear that satisfying clatter and bump.

No, God comes when we wait. Just sitting, just being present, with a powerful and alert anticipation, a pregnant, focused, poised-at-the-edge-of-the-abyss awakeness. Hoping for, waiting for- exactly nothing. Plunging into the moment of being alive. Just that, and nothing extra.

Wu.

From Sant Mat to Buddhism

I'm not a Buddhist. I don't know what I am, belief-wise. So I suppose that could make me a Buddhist. Buddhism isn't big on beliefs.

Hakuin, an 18^th century Zen master, extolled doubting in a fashion that is worlds apart from faith-based religions like Christianity.

If you keep on doubting continuously, with a bold spirit and a feeling of shame urging you on, your effort will naturally become unified and solid, turning into a single mass of doubt throughout heaven and earth. The spirit will feel suffocated, the mind distressed, like a bird in a cage, like a rat that has gone into a bamboo tube and cannot escape.

Granted, that isn't uplifting. But Buddhists are much more into being real. And reality, as we all know, is filled with suffering. Plus, doubt.

Hans, a long-time friend, and I had one of our never-ending Sunday coffee shop conversations today. We're always on the edge of figuring it all out.

Problem is, our figuring proceeds apace philosophically without knowing what "It" is. So that keeps us on this side of the edge. But we had a good latte-fueled time talking about the view from where we are.

For both of us, that's looking more Buddhist'ish, whether or not we use that term.

Hans still has a fondness for Sant Mat and the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, though he's never been initiated into the RSSB fold. And I was a true believer from 1970 until whenever my doubts started to bubble up out of the mud of blind faith that I'd plastered over them.

Today we talked about the importance of saying it like it is. Not the big capital "I" It. Everyday "it" – our relationships, thoughts, emotions, activities, hopes, fears. In short, life as each of us is living it now.

There may be a there and then after death. Hans and I don't know. Nobody on earth knows, since every person living is still alive.

Hakuin and other Buddhists aren't much concerned with there-and-then's. They're into what's going on here and now, coming to grips what who the heck is trying to figure it all out, which is a whole different thing from tying down "It."

In "Hakuin on Kensho" editor Albert Low comments on Hakuin's Zen teaching.

The boundless light is not a light that we can see, but the light by which we see. In the unawakened state we ignore this light…We overlook the fact that we know this world. We ignore the truth that the world is as it is because we know it to be so.

…Hakuin is saying that deep, deep questioning must pervade our lives. "What is it?" Everything must point to this question: "What is this?"

We use words and expressions such as knowing, intelligence, supreme wisdom, mirror wisdom, bodhisattvas, or Buddha-nature.

We wonder what the words mean and so use other words as definitions, and then wonder in turn what those words mean. What use are all the jangling words? And what is asking the question?

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Oregon (where I live) was part of the Canadian Radha Soami Satsang Beas organizational structure. I was the local RSSB organizer, the secretary. I reported to Jiti Khanna, the RSSB representative, who lived in Vancouver, Canada.

I liked Dr. Khanna a lot. He was wonderfully unassuming. Our Salem group (sangat) frequently would invite him down to give a talk (satsang).

One year I picked him up at the motel where he was staying with his family. I drove them over to the community hall that we'd rented for a Sunday satsang and potluck.

Quite a few people had come for this special occasion, a chance to hear the guru's representative talk about the RSSB teachings.

I went up to the podium and welcomed everybody. Then I introduced Dr. Khanna, who was sitting in the front row, and sat next to him.

After a few seconds I saw that Dr. Khanna was still in his chair. He was calmly looking at the podium. I waited a bit longer. Then I understood what was going on.

Dr. Khanna didn't expect that he was the star attraction. He apparently was totally comfortable with driving all the way from Vancouver, spending the night in a motel, and then being just another attendee at our Salem RSSB get-together.

I thought I'd made it clear that we wanted him to speak, but he was in the moment. Sitting still. Watching the podium. Waiting for the talk to begin.

I nudged him. "Dr. Khanna," I said. "You're the speaker."

He turned to me. "Oh, very good." He stood up and proceeded to give a wonderful extemporaneous satsang for 45 minutes or so. Warm, humble, inspiring.

I can't remember anything about what Dr. Khanna said. Just how he said it.

It didn't surprise me when, in the early 1990s, we heard that he'd resigned as RSSB representative and taken up Buddhist practice.

Since, I haven't heard much about Jiti Khanna. There have been some posts about him on a Radha Soami discussion site, including this mention of a TIME magazine letter mentioning Sant Mat that apparently was written by him.

I hope Dr. Khanna is doing well. I'd like to know how his spiritual trajectory from Sant Mat to Buddhism to whatever has proceeded.

Most likely: quite nicely.

There’s nothing wrong with me (or you)

Last Sunday a friend loaned me a copy of "There Is Nothing Wrong With You" by Cheri Huber. The title appealed to me instantly, since it's so obviously right.

I mean, most of the time it's crystal clear to me that I'm absolutely fine. It's other people who are all screwed up, the way they don't behave like I want them to.

Problem is, they feel the same. So the conventional wisdom is that the world is made up of six billion humans chanting a mantra of "I'm right and you're wrong."

This certainly seems to be the foundation of religion (and politics). But Huber, a Zen practitioner who melds Buddhist and self-help philosophy, has a different slant on rightness and wrongness.

Her book's subtitle, in the new edition, is "going beyond self-hate." She sees self-hate as the root of the sense of wrongness that permeates most people's everyday lives.

Trying to STOP, FIX, or CHANGE is part of the self-hating process. Just stay with the experience and REALLY GET IT. That this is sad, it's not wrong, it's just hard, it's hard to be a being. How can we not feel compassion?

Of course, ego will jump right in there and say, "Enough of this sadness. Let's DO something about it." That DO-ality will flip us right back into the bottom of the pot. I imagine a big stew pot of self-hate, and you just about crawl up to the top of the pot when you run into something that flips you right back in.

Usually this "something" is: trying to change what you are experiencing. Criticizing yourself, judging somebody else, thinking you need to change something, fix something, DO something—

And you are right back in the bottom of the pot of self hate. Again…

(My edition of "There Is Nothing Wrong With You" is typeset in a handwritten fashion, with an informal style. Usually I'm not a big fan of CAPS and cutesy layouts, but it works in this book – though the format looks a bit strange when quoted as I did above.)

There's a lot of simple wisdom in the easy-to-read pages that I whipped through in a couple of morning pre-meditation reading sessions. Such as:

I am not here to become an acceptable person. I am here to accept the person I am.

It may be true that you make sacrifices, but that doesn't make you good; it just means that you make sacrifices.

It may be true that you are accepting, but that doesn't make you good; it just means you are accepting.

It may be true that you are responsible, but that doesn't make you good; it just means you are responsible.

It may be true that you meditate, but that doesn't make you good; it just means that you meditate.

We label these behaviors good and then continue to do them in order to support self-hate. Perhaps doing in order to be good is what keeps you from realizing that you are already good.

Insightful.

Those last two lines made me think about my motivations during a long period of true-believing religiosity. I really enjoyed feeling that I was on the right spiritual path, because left to my own devices obviously I'd wander off and get lost, screw-up that I am.

So, yes, self-hate (or at least self-mistrust) kept me reading the books, attending the services, sticking to the straight and narrow, fearing to question. Oh my god, what would happen if I followed my own instincts? Well, Huber says:

All of life's conflicts are between letting go or holding on. Opening into the present or clinging to the past. Expansion or contraction.

…Life is very short. We do not have time to be frightened. We do not have the luxury of allowing fear and hate to run our lives. THIS IS IT!

…We cling to our belief that there is something wrong because that's how we maintain our position at the center of the universe.

Suffering provides our identity. Identity is maintained in struggle, in dissatisfaction, in trying to fix what's wrong. So we are constantly looking for what is wrong, constantly creating new crises so we can rise to the occasion.

To ego, that's survival. It is very important that something be wrong so we can continue to survive it.

I'd think: Oh no! There was a smidgen of meat in the food that I ate! I've broken my vegetarian vow! I should have checked more carefully – interrogated the cook, inspected every bite before I swallowed it, something!

As the familiar Zen story goes, I was the monk who watched his colleague carry a beautiful woman across a stream (a no-no for these monastic guys) and stewed about it for miles afterward. Until he said, "Why did you pick her up? You know we're not supposed to touch women."

The response: "I left the woman back on the stream bank. You're still carrying her. Who is the biggest vow-breaker?"

My wife and I have been taking dance lessons for a couple of years. They've attuned me to the difference between moving to patterns, versus moving freely.

Not that the two are separate and distinct. They're related. Because I can be leading a series of moves, a pattern, that is clear in my own mind. I know what is supposed to happen.

But Laurel doesn't, either because I haven't led the move correctly (usually the case) or because she doesn't know how to follow the lead.

Either way, when I have the Oops sensation that things aren't going as planned, I've got choices.

I can either try to force my partner to do what she darn well should be doing because I intended it, which can lead to stopping the dance and having a discussion (or argument) on the ballroom floor, or I can adjust myself to her movement.

Change my plan in accord with reality – which almost always is the preferred option.

It isn't that I'm right and she's wrong, or the reverse. Something simply is going on, and we both need to flow with it. I like what Huber says here:

What would maintain egocentricity? How would you know who you are?

It is only the illusion of a separate self who could believe that it is possible to make mistakes. Because, in fact, there isn't anything going on other that what is.

It is only in some imaginary parallel universe where this could happen, or this could happen, that we get that kind of alternative: what happened – what should have happened

As far as I know, it is only when we hold the notion that something happened this way, but it should have happened that way that we can say, "Well, I had this experience, but that is the one I was supposed to have.

I don't think so.

…We have a choice.

We can live our lives trying to conform to some nebulous standard or we can live our lives seeing how everything works.

When we step back and look at it that way, it is obvious that the attitude of fascination is the only intelligent one to bring to anything.

Huckabee wants Constitution to be “God’s standards”

Only in America. And Iran. Few countries in the world would entertain the idea of founding their constitution on a religious standard. Sadly, I live in one.

It's astounding. A leading contender for the presidency of the United States, Mike Huckabee, says:

I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that's what we need to do -- to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.

If ever there was a reason to embrace churchlessness, here it is.

Huckabee is an engaging guy with a good sense of humor (I enjoyed his recent repartee with Stephen Colbert), but he's also deeply troubling.

I prefer Christian crazies like Pat Robertson, who are so obviously loony that few take them seriously. Huckabee appeals to the Christian faithful, but his likable personal style has the potential of reeling in unsuspecting moderate voters.

Hopefully they'll notice his talk about bringing the Constitution in line with "God's standards" and realize that this is horribly un-American.

But wonderfully Iranian. In the early 1980s Ayatollah Khomeini revised the Iranian constitution along the lines Mike Huckabee salivates over.

Article 2
The Islamic Republic is a system based on belief in:
1. The One God (as stated in the phrase "There is no god except Allah"), His exclusive sovereignty and the right to legislate, and the necessity of submission to His commands;
2. Divine revelation and its fundamental role in setting forth the laws;
3. The return to God in the Hereafter, and the constructive role of this belief in the course of man's ascent towards God;
4. The justice of God in creation and legislation . . .

So before we amend the Constitution, this country needs to debate which God gets to set the standards. Christian? Jewish? Muslim? Sikh?

And if we add some quotation marks, "God" includes the divinity of Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and lots of other "ism's."

It's going to be tough deciding which religion has the best connection with God, and so can be trusted to guide our Constitution revision efforts.

Naturally I favor the Religion of Me. Which has a significant advantage over Huckabee's Christianity: I'm not trying to impose my faith on anybody else.

Skepticism isn’t “blind faith”

Religious believers like to say that agnosticism or atheism also is founded on faith – faith that there's no evidence for God. So skeptics are as filled with faith as the faithful.

That's ridiculous. It's the sort of word play that led Donald Rumsfeld, the incompetent Secretary of Defense, to say "absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence" in reference to Iraq's unfound weapons of mass destruction.

Well, I see no evidence of a unicorn in our living room right now. There's just my wife and our dog, neither of whom looks like a horse with a horn coming out of its head.

But gosh, I guess you could say that this lack of evidence doesn't conclusively prove that there's no unicorn in my house. The creature could be so small, it's hiding under the couch. Or it could be invisible.

The thing is, there's an obvious difference between: (1) surmising that something exists, and (2) surmising that something doesn't exist.

It's the difference between one and zero, presence and absence.

This is why I reacted with a What the heck? when I read a Newsweek article, "Moderates Storm the Religious Battlefield," that included this quote from Rev. Timothy Keller.

I urge skeptics to wrestle with the unexamined "blind faith" on which skepticism is based, and to see how hard it is to justify those beliefs to those who do not share them.

Rev. Keller, skepticism is not a belief. It's a reasonable response to absence of evidence.

I don't have blind faith that there's no unicorn in my living room. It's an open-eyed conclusion that anyone is welcome to refute, if they can show me where the unicorn is hiding.

Similarly, religious skeptics like me are very much open to evidence of God's existence. Problem is, there isn't any.

In a recent issue of New Scientist, A.C. Grayling addressed a related subject in "No, science does not 'rest on faith.'" He was responding to the notion that science's assumption of an orderly and intelligible universe is an act of faith.

It isn't, because the universe obviously is orderly and intelligible, or there wouldn't be notions, magazines, debates over faith, or anything else. It'd all just be misty chaos.

I agree with Grayling:

Making well-motivated evidence-based assumptions that are in turn supported by their efficacy in testing predictions is the very opposite of faith. Faith is commitment to belief in something either in the absence of evidence or in the face of countervailing evidence.

It is seen as a theological virtue, as the story of Doubting Thomas is designed to illustrate. In everyday speech we use the phrase "he took it on faith" to mean "without question, without examining the grounds"; this captures its essence.

So faith isn't a virtue. It's a vice. When we have eyes to see, it's wrong for someone to go about blindly. You cause lots of other problems for other people, and sow unnecessary confusion.

There's a unicorn! And God!

Where? Show me. I'm a skeptic with eyes.

Let it go. So simple.

Most people think that being spiritual or religious means holding on to something or someone. That's what they think faith means: clinging to unproven beliefs or an unsubstantiated savior.

"Jesus died for our sins." "Guru is God." "There is no God but Allah."

There's no end to religious dogma. An amazing variety of thoughts and world-views are contained in the minds of true believers.

If you can conceive of it, likely someone has faith in it at this moment. So how is it possible to choose which of these countless belief systems is worthy of acceptance, given that they contradict each other and lack evidentiary proof?

My advice: let them all go.

Every single one. Start fresh. Or as fresh as possible, since it's hard to sweep the belief-floor completely clean after a lifetime of religious rubbish has been strewn around.

That's been my goal for the past decade or so – out with the old and in with the new. Which to begin with (and maybe to end with) will be a new that's nothing.

Not an absolute nothing. It's nothing but what is really there. It'll feel like nothing, though, if your spiritual or religious practice used to be founded on ideas, concepts, emotions, imaginings, and beliefs.

Getting rid of clutter, whether physical or mental, can be bittersweet. Bitter, because we get attached to our crap, as useless as it is.

Whenever I'm poised to toss a worn-out shirt in the garbage, or take an unwanted book to Goodwill, there's usually a part of me that says, But maybe I should keep it…

I can't think of any reason to. It just can be hard to let go of familiar objects. And even harder, to let go of familiar beliefs.

Which is where the sweet part comes in, when I do let go. Then I feel the lightness that comes with a reduction in my crap burden. I've gotten rid of something that I didn't need, which means there's more room in my life for useful stuff.

For quite a while I've only been attracted to philosophical or mystical teachings that take the same approach to spirituality: toss out whatever you can.

If it moves, it goes, because reality isn't all the clutter – it's the floor that our mental crap sits on.

As non-Christian as I am, one of the books that sits permanently in my meditation area is Thomas Keating's Open Mind, Open Heart (this is a new edition, which I haven't read, but am confident is as good as the original).

Most mornings I open it up and read a few paragraphs to inspire my churchless soul. Into letting go.

Keating preaches the value of repeating a simple word during a period of contemplation to cut down on the myriad thoughts, religious or secular, that normally fill our minds.

Even that word is to be let go also. It isn't the goal, but rather it represents our intention to reach the source of the stream of consciousness upon which our thoughts, emotions, beliefs, perceptions, and what-not float.

Some excerpts:

The sacred word is not a vehicle or means to go from the surface of the river to the depths. It is rather a condition for going there. If I hold a ball in my hands and let go, it will fall to the floor. I don't need to throw it.

In similar fashion, the sacred word is a way of letting go of all thoughts. This makes it easier for our spiritual faculties, which are attracted to interior silence, to move spontaneously in that direction. Such a movement does not require effort. It only requires the willingness to let go of our ordinary preoccupations.

…The chief thing that separates us from God is the thought that we are separated from Him. If we get rid of that thought, our troubles will be greatly reduced.

…By training ourselves to let go of every thought and thought pattern, we gradually develop freedom from our attachments and compulsions.

…God's presence is available at every moment, but we have a giant obstacle in ourselves – our world view.

"God," for me, is a synonym for "reality." And that's pretty much the meaning Keating ascribes to the word.

Something remains when all of our ideas and beliefs are let go of. Whatever it is, no name can describe it. But it's real. And here, now.

Just let go. And there, it is.

Morality doesn’t need a middleman

Doing good. We all want to do it, aside from a small number of people with a highly me-centered worldview. For I see the essence of morality as act toward others as you'd want them to act toward you.

When there's no sense of mutuality, of relationship, of reciprocal give and take, morality (such as it is) is reduced to act toward others however you want. It's all about me, me, me.

So goodness, like Tango, takes two. Otherwise, it's selfishness.

However, most religious believers want to complicate morality by adding in a middleman.

God. Or a stand-in for God, such as Jesus or someone else considered to be god in human form (there are quite a few modern candidates for this honor including Sant Mat gurus and Meher Baba).

The idea is that unless you're doing something for the sake of God or the guru, it isn't really good.

So you could be volunteering at soup kitchens, giving money to charity, and taking care of a sick neighbor. But if you weren't thinking, "This all is for you, _______ [name of divinity]," it wouldn't rate high on the goodness scale.

Pretty strange. Christopher Hitchens' The Portable Atheist includes an essay by George Eliot that critiques the dogmatism of a Christian fundamentalist of her day, a Dr. Cumming. (Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans.) Elliott quotes Cumming:

The "thoughts" are evil. If it were possible to human eye to discern and to detect the thoughts that flutter round the heart of an unregenerate man – to mark their hue and their multitude – it would be found that they are indeed "evil."

We speak not of the thief, and the murderer, and the adulterer, and such-like, whose crimes draw down the cognizance of earthly tribunals, and whose unenviable character it is to take the lead in the paths of sin; but we refer to the men who are marked out by their practice of many of the seemliest moralities of life – by the exercise of the kindliest affections, and the interchange of the sweetest reciprocities – and of these men, if unrenewed and unchanged, we pronounce that their thoughts are evil.

To ascertain this, we must refer to the object around which our thoughts ought continually to circulate. The Scriptures assert that this object is the glory of God; that for this we ought to think, to act, and to speak; and that in thus thinking, acting, and speaking, there is involved the purest and more endearing bliss.

…If the glory of God is not the absorbing and the influential aim of their thoughts, then they are evil; but God's glory never enters into their minds.

Now, one would expect this sort of fundamentalist message from a Christian.

But Eastern religions can be just as obsessed about thinking of God all of the time, no matter what you're doing (leaving aside the not-so-minor problem, common also to Western faiths, that it's tough to think about something imaginary).

I thumbed through a few issues of a Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) newsletter and found these thoughts from a representative of this India-based spiritual organization.

While working, whatever you do to earn your livelihood or maintain your home and family obligations, remember God and your Master throughout the day as your main preoccupation…Serve others with your spare time and work in the name of the Lord.

When I was hot and heavy into RSSB, I used to try to do this. But as mentioned above, I found it difficult to do. And distracting, because doing everything "for the glory of God" or "in the name of the Lord" is the antithesis of chop wood and carry water.

That is, when I was washing dishes I'd do my best to visualize this as being for the Master's (guru's) benefit. But he wasn't in the house – just me and my wife were.

So adding in an imaginary middleman between me and whatever I was doing eventually came to seem entirely unnecessary, and more than a little weird.

I knew people who'd say, "Thank you, God" or "Thank you, guru" when they'd find an empty parking space on a crowded street. What's up with that? Why not simply pull in and park?

Similarly, some RSSB initiates would go to considerable trouble to travel hundreds of miles, or even halfway across the world to India, in order to do volunteer work for their religious organization.

They seemed to feel that doing good didn't count unless it was done without a thought of the guru in mind, who is a stand-in for God in many Eastern faiths. George Eliot persuasively argues otherwise:

Dr. Cumming's theory, as we have seen, is that actions are good or evil according as they are prompted or not prompted by an exclusive reference to the "glory of God." God, then, in Dr. Cumming's conception, is a Being who has no pleasure in the exercise of love and truthfulness and justice, considered as affecting the well-being of His creatures.

He has satisfaction in us only in so far as we exhaust our motives and dispositions of all relation to our fellow beings, and replace sympathy for men by anxiety for the "glory of God."

…A wife is not to devote herself to her husband out of love to him and a sense of the duties implied by a close relation – she is to be a faithful wife for the glory of God; if she feels her natural affections welling up too strongly, she is to repress them; it would not do to act from natural affection – she must think of the glory of God.

Observing both myself and other God/guru obsessed devotees, I began to see how this misdirecting of natural impulses leads to a three's a crowd syndrome.

Meaning, religious believers reach a point where just about all of their human interactions include a third party: a conception of the divine entity to whom their fealty truly lies. They actually believe that Jesus, God, or the guru is present with them and is aware of everything they're doing or thinking.

Which, of course, also is the case with another supposedly omnipresent being: Santa Claus.

George Eliot speaks about how destructive it is to have an imaginary middle man intrude himself in such a fashion:

The idea of a God who not only sympathizes with all we feel and endure for our fellow men, but who will pour new life into our too languid love, and give firmness to our vacillating purpose, is an extension and multiplication of the effects produced by human sympathy; and it has been intensified for the better spirits who have been under the influence of orthodox Christianity, by the contemplation of Jesus as "God manifest in the flesh."

But Dr. Cumming's God is the very opposite of all this: He is a God who, instead of sharing and aiding our human sympathies, is directly in collision with them; who, instead of strengthening the bond between man and man, by encouraging the sense that they are both alike the objects of His love and care, thrusts Himself between them and forbids them to feel for each other except as they have relation to Him.

He is a God who, instead of adding His solar force to swell the tide of those impulses that tend to give humanity a common life in which the good of one is the good of all, commands us to check those impulses, lest they should prevent us from thinking of His glory.

Well, screw that. And to hell with that God. Or guru.

There's already enough divisiveness in the world. No need to add to it by interposing a conception of a non-existent being between us and what we do.

More evidence Sant Mat is a religion

Yesterday Jay Lou left a comment on one of my posts that started off, "I don't want to be rude to you. But if you can't say anything good about something then don't say it at all."

I was surprised by that sentiment. I seem to recall an elementary school teacher saying something similar back in first or second grade, but adults rarely, if ever, speak that way.

It struck me as remarkably unscientific.

Yet it was pretty obvious that the commenter was a devotee of Sant Mat (likely the Radha Soami Satsang Beas branch), a spiritual path that I used to follow assiduously, and which likes to call itself the "Science of the Soul."

For the rest of his comment was:

This path is to be experienced on our own. It doesn't always work with everyone, even the Masters say that. Even though things might be going good for you but at the time of your death you will see what you have turned your back on. This mind of ours makes us doubt a lot and we have to control it. I'm just saying this to you to please don't say anything about the path, if you can't say anything good then don't say anything at all. Respect the path for what it is, even if you think its wrong and gives and didn't work for you. I think you have lost faith and don't know what you have lost. I just hope one day you understand and find what you are looking for.

It's difficult to imagine a scientist advising a colleague, "Don't say anything about this theory. Respect it for what is, even if it appears to be wrong and unworkable."

But it's easy to picture a religious fundamentalist wanting to stifle criticism of his belief system. Which sure seems to be the case here.

Lots of God-fearing people are, obviously, swayed by fear. Guru-fearing people also. I used to be one of them, so I understand where Jay Lou is coming from.

He believes that if you're not initiated by a perfect living Master who has been sent by God to take on the sins (karma) of marked souls who are destined to return to their heavenly father, then you're screwed after you die.

Just as Christianity teaches, there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth as you're thrown into the clutches of the Devil (which Sant Mat calls the "negative power" or Universal Mind).

Well, maybe at the time of my death I really will see what I've turned my back on. But I doubt it. What I've made a commitment to face myself toward is truth – reality.

It's difficult for me to imagine that reality is going to turn into fantasy after death. And I don't see any evidence that the cosmos has been set up so that certain souls are punished post mortem, and other souls are rewarded.

My spirituality, if you want to call it that (I think of it more as reality'ity), is premised on a scientific assumption: universal laws are just that. They apply to everyone, everywhere.

Gravity doesn't care if someone believes in it or not. Gravity doesn't care if someone criticizes it, or not. Gravity doesn't care if someone calls it by every swear word in their lexicon, or not.

By contrast, many people believe that God (or his emissary, such as a guru) does care. So they are super-careful about not taking the Lord's name in vain, bad mouthing their chosen divinity, expressing doubts about this being, and such.

They view God as akin to an easily offended human. Someone you don't want to say anything bad about, because he doesn't take kindly to criticism. Hence, "if you can't say something good, then don't say anything at all."

Well, what I say about Sant Mat and Radha Soami Satsang Beas on this blog is based on more than thirty-five years of intimate experience. I diligently followed the path that Jay Lou refers to, and now I feel entirely justified in speaking about what I found – and didn't find – along the way.

That's science, whether it be directed at knowing physical reality or what, if anything, may lie beyond the physical. You say it like it is, recognizing that "is" continually changes as reality becomes better understood.

What you don't do is censor the truth as you perceive it because such might offend someone. That's ridiculous, especially if it's considered that ultimate reality (a.k.a. "God") is the one being offended.

If God is that fickle and hyper-sensitive, I've got no interest in kissing his ass. Actually, I'm not interested in divine ass kissing regardless of God's desires in this regard, because if I'm going to affix my lips to a posterior, I want it to be a real one.

Jacob just submitted his own blog comment on "Reality is the best religion." My reaction? Right on, dude.

I agree, im 16, many people around me believe that their is a heaven or hell, why? i mean maybe if life was a movie or video game sure, but seriously when has something like that ever been seen before your eyes? when you die, your dead so live it up

I also liked Benito's response to Jay Lou. Nicely said.

Believers, let’s have a faith-off

Everybody's familiar with a face-off. It's a confrontation. Well, I'm challenging religious believers to something similar: a faith-off.

Bring it on. Your best philosophical stuff.

Let's see who can be reasonably considered to have the most faith – churchless me, and those who share my antipathy to dogmatism, fundamentalism, and other "ism's," or those who profess the traditional religious commitment to a belief in the reality of things unknown.

In my utterly biased opinion, it's no contest. Those, like me, who proclaim a faithless faith are head and shoulders above the crowd of religious believers.

For open-mindedness is a much higher virtue than walling oneself off in an illusory fortress of knowledge, that, in reality, is completely open to attack by arrows of truth.

One of my first Church of the Churchless posts was "Just have faith." Re-reading it just now, I'd say that it pretty much says it all. Such as:

Faith is wonderful.
Faith is all we need to be spiritual.
Just faith. Faith alone.
So we shouldn't have faith in anything other than pure, naked, empty faith.

What is faith stripped of thought, emotion, perception, expectation, imagination? Whatever it is, that's what we are seeking. Such is the message at the mystical core of every deep spiritual teaching.

… Such is a scientific faith, a faith that does not foreclose in advance any possibility about what reality may consist of, a faith not in the unproven pronouncements of some supposedly holy person or book but in one's own direct experience of divinity--or direct non-experience, as the case may be.

I recall several encounter groups that I took part in which included a trust-building exercise. I'd stand with my eyes closed. Other group members would be behind me.

Then I'd lean backward until I fell over, making no attempt to break my fall. It was disconcerting, requiring faith that someone would catch me before I banged my head on the hard floor.

However, I'd seen my companions take their positions. I'd talked with them beforehand. The group leader had explained what we were going to do, and why my trust was justified.

In short, I had a framework for my faith. It was akin to religious faith (except much more valid), because it wasn't really a leap into the unknown. It was a step along a well-trodden path of existing ideas and feelings.

Not what I talked about in "Just have faith." Naked, empty faith. Pure faith. Faith that doesn't require anything else to prop it up.

In a subsequent post, "Don't believe, just have faith," I quoted Alan Watts' view of how one gets in touch with the deepest roots of reality.

The discovery of this reality is hindered rather than helped by belief, whether one believes in God or believes in atheism. We must make here a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would "lief" or wish it to be.

The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

So, yes, I'm ready for a faith-off.

I haven't yet been able to let cast off all my clinging to spiritual beliefs, but compared to religious believers I've got much more confidence that reality will catch me when I let go.

Conversing with a churchless Christian

Periodically I have a pleasant email conversation with Steve, a Christian who rarely goes to church. I like how Steve is willing to consider the blasphemous and ungodly musings posted here.

Interestingly, it was two years ago today that I shared a thoughtful message from Steve in my "Why I'm not a Christian." Since, Steve has been a regular Church of the Churchless visitor.

On New Year's Day he emailed me again. Steve spoke about the lack of change he observes in the content of this blog – both my posts and the comments of other people. I found this intriguing.

Because I both agree and disagree with him.

I expressed my yin and yang reaction to his message in a reply. Which led to Steve…(make a guess) changing.

Cool. I like a guy who walks his own talk. Wish I could be as self-consistent. Anyway, our email conversation follows, mildly edited. My favorite line from Steve: "Maybe the conversation itself is the goal."

Join in, if you like. Has anything you've read here changed your mind about something? Or spurred you to lead your life differently in some way?

(the conversation between Steve and me is fairly lengthy, so I'll make it a continuation to this post)

I’m a Bright, see me shine

I'd heard of brights before, but didn't know that it was possible to become a Bright (with a capital "B") until Tao, a frequent Church of the Churchless visitor, mentioned the brights web site in a recent comment.

This evening I learned enough about bright-ness to conclude that I could sign up as an official Bright.

You can be a lower case "bright" just by considering yourself to be such. But registering on the brights web site turns you into a honest to God nature "Bright."

Slipped up just now. Hope my reference to a supernatural entity doesn't void my registration. Because the essence of being a bright is a naturalistic worldview.

That fits me, since my sensibilities are becoming more and more Taoist. The way I see it, everything real is natural. Otherwise, it'd be unreal – fantasy, imagination, belief.

More accurately, those products of the human mind are real, but only in an extremely limited sense. They aren't lasting aspects of the natural world like trees, water, stars, frogs, and jellyfish are.

Or as gravity, electromagnetism, quarks, electrons, and black holes are.

I had to ponder what I mean by "natural" before I took the plunge and became a Bright (which took less than a minute and should only entail getting a newsletter emailed to me every month or so).

I'm entirely open to the possibility that realms of reality exist beyond the physical. Heck, so are physicists and cosmologists, since higher dimensions are a hot scientific topic these days, especially in string theory.

So would the existence of a higher dimension beyond the three of space and one of time that we're familiar with be natural, or supernatural?

Me, I'd call it a part of nature. A hitherto unconfirmed part that now has joined our understanding of what reality is all about.

Magnetism once was thought to point to a soul or god, a supernatural entity. Now we know better. Electrical and magnetic phenomena are governed by natural laws.

We haven't come to the end of our knowledge of those laws, for sure. So brights need to be open to an ever-expanding view of what is "natural."

Quantum entanglement, where particles separated by millions of miles (or even light years) change instantly in concert with each other, once was felt to be too strange to be real. But it is.

I agree with what J.B.S. Haldane said:

I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.